It is commonly accepted that adding tactile feedback to media objects such as images, movies or audio clips can, in some cases, enhance the user experience of the media object. For example a photo of a cat may have a purring tactile sensation associated with it. A key challenge in associating tactile feedback with media objects is that most rendering engines do not make provisions for explicit haptic effect information. It is possible to have a separate file or stream with this information, but this secondary content source complicates existing content delivery mechanisms such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”).
One potential solution to this challenge is to automatically generate haptic content from the media object at the rendering endpoint. Existing algorithms and methods may do this type of content creation by using audio and movie media objects as input. Other algorithms and methods may extract spatial texture information from images and render this locally. Both of these approaches are suitable only for mechanically obvious haptic displays. Novel content as intended by the content producer cannot be generated with this approach.